Luna

Luna and Modular (4MS and More)

This is the gray Luna we met last year when she was hiding behind a Eurorack system. Here we see here sitting next to a similar system. From @panic_hardware via Twitter.

My cat has resting bitch face

Despite the sad visage, we are confident that Luna gets lots of Love. As for the modules themselves, we immediately recognize the 4MS Spectral Multiband Resonator with its distinctive ring of light, as well as the 4MS Tapographic delay right out front. The others will have to remain an exercise for the reader.

Remembering Luna, Two Years Later

Even with so much happening in our own lives and in the world at large, we pause it all on this night to remember our beloved Luna, who passed away two years ago on October 31.

There is a both a poetic beauty and a cruel irony in the fact that she left us on Hallowe’en.  It was the day every year that she was the star of cat-blogging world, hosting the annual Hallowe’en edition of Weekend Cat Blogging and being the most beautiful of beautiful black cats.

As we begin the yahrzeit, we light our memorial candle, and pay special respects to her memorial.

There was a moment of explosive grief as I told her, wherever and however she is, that I miss her so much.  After that, a calmer sadness settled in as I sip a glass of bourbon, play “Dollar Days” from David Bowie’s Blackstar, and assemble this post.

Luna closeup portrait

She was a work of art, and fit in perfectly with aesthetics and design of CatSynth HQ.

But she was also extremely sweet and loving.

Please join me in remembering our sweet little girl, who left us way too soon.  She will always be missed, never forgotten.

Weekend Cat Blogging with Sam Sam, and Remembering Luna on #BlackCatDay

Sam Sam continues to delight every day with her adorable antics.

And she certainly gets lots of love and attention in response.

It’s interesting to see how different her unique facial markings look from different angles.

Of course, being the constant center of attention can be quite exhausting, so there is always time for naps.

Sam Sam often sticks a paw on her tail while sleeping, a trait we have remarked on before.  I don’t know whether it serves a purpose or is just a quirky habit, but it is very sweet.

Today is #BlackCatDay, and an opportunity to celebrate and recognize black cats as we close in on Halloween when stereotypes and threats sometimes reach a crescendo.  It breaks our hearts to think of any cat being hurt or abused, but black cats can face an especially different time.

For years, the celebration of black cats on and around Halloween was a ritual, with Luna often hosting the special Halloween Black-Cat Edition of Weekend Cat Blogging (back when that was a shared thing).  Now it is more a time to remember and reflect on Luna, who left us on October 31 two years ago.  We will have a proper remembrance on that day, but for now, we just want to bask in the beauty of our beloved black kitty.

CatSynth 12th Anniversary

It’s our twelfth anniversary!  It’s hard to believe that this little project I started as a lark in 2006 is still going and expanding.  Here is that first picture of Luna that went up on July 19, 2006!

As always, we look to the anniversary as a moment for reflection and for changes.  We don’t have compiled detailed stats this year, but we do have several high-level milestones.  Most notably, we launched CatSynth TV last October, and since then have shared 74 videos! More are on the way.  We have continued to develop our apps, including the original CatSynth: The App! and Highway☆, though there is so much more we want to do there, both with existing and new apps.  And Sam Sam has blossomed into the new star of CatSynth!  With so many facets competing for our attention, there has been less time for the long-form reviews that once dominated this site, though we still write long-form articles when we can.  So with that, we make some announcements:

  • Sam Sam finally takes her rightful place on the masthead alongside the late great Luna!  It’s a change that is long overdue.  And appropriately, we are featuring one of her scratch’n’roll poses.
  • We are going to open up the site to new voices.  We have already had a couple of guest music reviews, and of course the semi-regular Mensa Cats cartoon series.  This is going to expand in the coming months.  If you have an idea for an article you would like to contribute, please let us know.
  • And as always, please keep sending us your cat-and-gear pics.

So please join Sam Sam and me in celebrating twelve years of CatSynth!  We look forward to sharing many more with all of you.

CatSynth Pic: Luna and Keyboards

Beautiful black cat Luna strikes a “noir” pose atop one keyboard and next to another.  Submitted by Matthew Vasquez via our Facebook page.  I really like the way the stripes of light play against the keyboards, which in turn heighten the black cat’s figure.

This is Luna is not our Luna, but looks so much like her!  You can read our more recent tribute to the late great Luna of CatSynth here.

Identification of the synths/keyboards left as an exercise to the reader.

Luna’s 13th Gotcha Day (in memoriam)

June 10 was Luna’s Gotcha Day.  For many years, it was one of the most joyous days of the calendar.  Since her passing in 2016, it has been challenging and melancholy. There is rarely a day when I don’t think about my special little girl and soulmate of almost 12 years.

Grief is a nonlinear process. The memories of her life, and of her loss, have mostly been integrated.  I can casually see pictures on a regular basis of her and remain in the moment, but scrolling back through them in a deliberate process this morning brings some tears.  CatSynth HQ is very much Sam Sam’s now, and we respect her territory (and spoil her rotten while doing so).  Yet even she sometimes seems to sense a presence of a former kitty in some of the corners and crevices that defy cleaning.

There is so much I miss about Luna.  Her beauty and elegance, her shy but sweet nature.

And she was fiercely territorial, especially when it came to me.  She did not like to share, but she made me feel very loved.  She could sit patiently while I made weird sounds in the studio.  And despite being a “strictly indoor” cat, she loved going outside on the patio after we moved to San Francisco.

Regular readers know I am not at all religious.  And I don’t have a particular notion of an afterlife.  But I do like to sometimes think about Luna taking her place among those I have lost over the years, mostly human friends and family.  The visualization is of them all standing and waiting patiently, a little black cat in front of the much taller people.  I also take comfort in the Rainbow Bridge, and in the community of cat bloggers who have loved and lost over these many years.

I do not expect that the grief will ever disappear entirely.  And that’s ok.  We continue.